Discussion
Cornell Chronicle
reedf1: There is a grotesquely pulsing layer of overconfident dumbasses in business (and society in general) and this is the language they speak. My job at any company, as far as I can see it, is to make sure my local orbit is cleared of these wackos. They are parasitic extractors of value and soul.
ericmay: “Might be bad at their jobs” was a very corporate speak way of saying they might be dumb.In case you missed that and were impressed by the bullshit language used. ;-)
oytis: Happy to see that the term "bullshit" has established itself in the scientific literature.
masfuerte: In summary, employees who are impressed by corporate bullshit do badly on tests of analytic intelligence. This is very unsurprising.
testfrequency: I have never met a Cornell grad who is pleasant to be around.I find it extremely fitting that they would feel compelled to write about this topic.
RobotToaster: To analyse the impact of this study I recommend that we set up an interdepartmental committee with fairly broad terms of reference so that at the end of the day we'll be in the position to think through the various implications and arrive at a decision based on long-term considerations rather than rush prematurely into precipitate and possibly ill-conceived action which might well have unforeseen repercussions.
ekjhgkejhgk: These headlines are crack for HN.
DrewADesign: Sure, but it’s not clickbait. It accurately reflects the article content, and seemingly, the discussed study’s results.
rdevilla: I suspect this is why formal languages exist; as a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bay, and a system for turning bullshit into parse errors.We are undoing much of this progress by now insisting everything be expressed in natural language for a machine to translate on our behalf, like a tour guide.The natives will continue to speak amongst themselves in their mother tongue.
VorpalWay: How was this a surprise to anyone with more than three braincells?But I guess it is good to have this study to point to in your workplace, instead of just seeing that it is self evident.
eucyclos: I thought tfa would say seeking synergy is a sign one is struggling with ones own deliverables so one tries to add value elsewhere in the organization. Is synergy really such a poorly defined term that it's synonymous with corporate bullshit?
alcasa: Obligatory Simpsons reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqb-VzkfRrY
testfrequency: Thanks I love it. Can’t believe I haven’t seen this episode before.
phkahler: “Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it, creating a sort of negative feedback loop.Technically that's a positive feedback loop, or reinforcing feedback loop. The author is probably using "negative" in to mean undesirable. Gotta get your jargon right!
RobotToaster: You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
alcasa: Maybe controversial, but I believe a lot of OOP/Clean Code patterns are the software equivalent of corporate BS.
joe_mamba: > but I believe a lot of OOP/Clean Code patterns are the software equivalent of corporate BS.They're the corporate equivalent of USSR soviet style conformism, when everyone was calling each other comrade and refusal to do that had repercussions.Similarly, if you refuse to follow the agile scrum manifesto or clean code practices, you get ousted.
andai: I found this title amusing, since I'm actually synergizing paradigms, i.e. trying to find the commonalities between different models of human behavior.(There are dozens of us!)
oniony: This sounds very impressive ;)
Aeolun: You think?
glitchc: Why is OOP lumped with Clean Code? Objects are useful for managing complex states and relationships. They are complementary, not mutually exclusive, to procedural and functional programming.
Hamuko: I feel like "synergy" has been the poster child for corporate buzzwords.
Intermernet: Yes, but have you decoded the ontological kerygma of the gestalt. No point synergizing paradigms unless you've got the kerygma sorted.
johnsillings: SOCIOPATHS │ SOCIOPATHS WITH MBAs │ SOCIOPATHS WHO LIKE POWERPOINT │ OVERWORKED DOERS │ CONFUSED PEOPLE │ LOSERS
CGMthrowaway: >a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bayCorporate speak as a signalling mechanism is only effective among the "clueless" in the Gervais model. If any CEO tried to talk 1:1 to a competent board member that way, they would lose all credibility. Once you've operated at a certain level you get it>a system for turning bullshit into parse errors.This is the (cynical version of) the framing I tend to hold about corporate speak. It's deliberately vague as a way to navigate uncertainty while still projecting authority and avoiding accountability in settings like a town hall, large meeting etc. Which is not to be read as a necessarily "bad" thing. No one wants a micromanaging CEO. They have to set vision and direction while leaving space for it top be executed by all the layers under them
delecti: I worked with a junior dev who suddenly got really excited about Clean Code. Every example he brought up left me feeling that there was a kernel of good advice, but the book wanted you to take it to such an extreme that it would result in shitty code.
ansgri: I feel like half of junior programmers are susceptible to this.
srean: There was a good corporate bullshit generator posted here in HN but probably before chatGPT became a thing. Can't seem to find it.Love ? That's for plebs. The right thing is to leverage wholistic synergizing paradigms.
hibikir: OOP pattern were useful for people stuck in a pure OOP language (say Java 1.4) And needed to make something understandable. Today, when many languages, including Java, have reasonable functional programming support, a large percentage of the patterns are over complicated. Just look at the list, and see how many can be replaced with less boilerplate by passing a function, doing some currying, or both.
pjerem: that's genius.
dchest: Note that this isn't a study of actual workplaces, it's based on cognitive tests, so "bad at their jobs" may be a stretch. For example, "overconfidence in one's intellectual and analytic abilities" may be good for business, e.g. when dealing with US government contracts in 2026.
antonymoose: Wildly controversial!I look at OOP Patterns as standards and practices.The same way we have building codes for staircases the framing of walls and electrical installations to prevent injury or collapse or fire.Sure, you can dodge a lot of design pattern paradigms and still make a working application that makes money. You can also invent your own system when building your house and maybe nothing bad will happen. That tragedy hasn’t yet struck does not make the building codes bad just because you got away with it.
alexc05: that's a bit of a meta discussion and it'd probably reveal some super interesting things about how tech culture have changed in the last ~15 years.I've been on HN since 2010 (lost the password to my first account, alexc04) and I recall a time when it felt like every second article on the front-page was an bold directive pronouncement or something just aggressively certain of its own correctness.Like "STOP USING BASH" or "JQUERY IS STUPID" - not in all caps of course but it created an unpleasant air and tone (IMO, again, this is like 16 years ago now so I may have memory degredation to some extent)Things like donglegate got real traction here among the anti-woke crew. There have been times where the venn diagram of 4chan and hackernews felt like it had a lot more overlap. I've even bowed out of discussion for years at a time or developed an avoidance reaction to HN's toxic discussion culture.IMO it has been a LOT better in more recent years, but I also don't dive as deep as I used to.ANYWAYS - my point is I would be really interested to see a sentiment analysis of HN headlines over the years to try and map out cultural epochs of the community.When has HN swayed more into the toxic and how has it swayed back and forth as a pendulum over time? (or even has it?)I wonder what other people's perspective is of how the culture here has changed over time. I truly think it feels a lot more supportive than it used to.
AreShoesFeet000: There are no natives anymore. For some time, really. Honestly I don’t even think there ever were.
NoSalt: "synergistic leadership" or "growth-hacking paradigms" are, in my opinion, what my teenage son refers to as "brain rot". I don't know where these people come from who make up these terms, or what childhood trauma has done this to them, but I absolutely cannot tolerate any of it, it makes my skin crawl.
hibikir: It's a bit better: They are forms of obfuscation and lowering information in a channel. They are designed for environments where being clear is very risky. In certain organizations, you are better off being unclear than asking for approval or consensus on a tricky decision: You produce an incomprehensible, vague mess of a message, and avoid argument, as argument in those places leads to paralysis.Now, does this mean it's the right way to talk everywhere? Of course not. And since it's often seen as safe, it's overused. But it doesn't just arise, as a bug. plain language that means what it says creates more conflict, and isn't always better.
Aeolun: When applied without thinking about why. Yes.Except dependency injection. I really can’t imagine why you’d ever not use that. I suppose it’s possible to overuse, but you’d still have better code than without. Certainly more testable code.
Scarblac: Because code becomes harder to understand.With direct dependencies, if you are trying to understand some code that calls some function and what it does exactly isn't completely obvious, you can press a button to go to it, understand it, and come back.With dependency injection it depends on what is going to be inserted during runtime, so you can't.
domga: A decent chunk of OOP patterns was due to lack of language features, notably passing and returning functions
irishcoffee: Are you referring to function pointers?I believe C has allowed passing and returning functions from... the jump, no?
ndriscoll: Not just function pointers. E.g. in Scala: def addX(x: Int) = { y: Int => x+y } addX(5) then returns a function that adds 5. So closures, which are equivalent to objects, and usually more straightforward.Once you get used to doing this, you realize it's useful everywhere.
VorpalWay: Yes. (There are other phrases too that should be red flags such as "strategizing", but "synergy" is probably the poster child).
encom: >other phrases"Pipeline". I hate this so much. At a previous job, it was used so much by management it became a meme on the production floor. When asked how many units had been sold, there was always a big number in the pipeline, when the real actual number was zero.It's a non-commitment word. Whatever is talked about may or may not happen or exist. Maybe it's ignorance or a straight up lie to shut up the people on the floor, but "pipeline" works maybe once or twice and then everyone is onto your bullshit.
Esophagus4: There does exist some purpose for corp-speak: it is a shared language for people in disparate parts of a large organization to communicate with. It is a tool, mostly for managers.Managers use it with peers because their job is coordination and communication.Managers shouldn’t talk to their reports in corp-speak, but think of it like a shared protocol for all messages in the corporate message bus.
lo_zamoyski: That's not quite accurate. Formal languages (which have an old pedigree) can be useful for clarification and inference, but they can also obfuscate the truth, and what's more, subvert it. Every logical formalism necessarily presupposes some metaphysics, and if the metaphysics is bad, or you fail to recognize the effective bounds of that formalism, you can fall into mechanically generated bullshit. Modern predicate logic suffers from known paradoxes and permits nonsensical and vacuous inferences (like those caused by material implication). More subtle effects are expressed in, for example, the problem of bare particulars.Formalism is a product of prior (semantic) reasoning that isn't formal. And because formalism is syntactic, not only can you still jam your semantic nonsense through it (through incoherent subjects and predicates, for example), but the formalism, stripped of semantics, can itself allow for nonsense. So formalism can actually aid and abet bad reasoning. The danger, of course, is the mistaken notion that "formal = rigorous".Formalism is also highly impractical and tedious in many circumstances, and it can depart from human reasoning as expressed in the grammar of natural language enough to be practically inscrutable. There is no reason why natural language cannot be clear and well-written. So, I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree here.The problem with LLMs isn't that they're not "formal". It's because they're statistical machines, not reasoning machines, yet many people treat them like magical oracles.
duped: > Which is not to be read as a necessarily "bad" thingI (and many others) read it as "dishonesty"
Barbing: Is there a historical example or does anyone have an anecdote of some crunch time where the CEO blowing hot air was the best thing for morale? Compared to what I might think a lot of us would prefer in many cases, which might be an honest assessment & making us part of the journey to overcome whatever adversity.
foundart: A good takeaway line from the article:> Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”and a link to the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400597536_The_Corpo...
languagehacker: Twaddling and puffery!
wiradikusuma: So I guess this is a double-edged test."Hmm, I want to hire people who fail CBSR test, I'll look like god to them. F*ck critical thinkers, I only need slightly above average people anyway."
jghn: It's both.The *concept* of patterns makes sense. A shared language that developers can use when building things.The *reality* of patterns has been much less useful. The original ones were indeed a reaction to warts in the popular languages of their era. And as we tend to do in our industry, these have been cargo culted along the way and for some reason I still see people talking about them as first class citizens 30 years later.People don't seem to realize that patterns should be and are fluid, and as our industry evolves these patterns are evolving as well. A major difference between software engineering and the analogous fields people use when talking about patterns is those industries are much older and move less quickly
jancsika: > a system for turning bullshit into parse errorsBecause when I go to view an old website from the 90s that's missing a closing tag for something, I don't want the content-- I want a big red XML parse error with a gigantic horizontal scrollbar.The history of programmers blithely attempting to add new parsing errors to existing problems instead of obviating them is long and storied. Your sentence would look right at home as part of the BS generated for the test subjects from the article.
arethuza: "an honest assessment & making us part of the journey to overcome whatever adversity"I suspect that most people just aren't wired up that way - we have a natural tendency to want to follow leaders and what we seem to want most from leaders is certainty and confidence. Does it matter what leaders are certain and confident about - not really.
headcanon: If anyone wants a chuckle, I vibe-coded an endless supply of "synergizing paradigm" terms as a slideshow for a fake corporation. It's fun to put on in the background on a tv somewhere to see if anyone notices.https://brightpath-global-solutions.com/
cess11: 'The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary,” but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.The study found that being more receptive to corporate bullshit was also positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements. Moreover, those who were more likely to fall for corporate BS were also more likely to spread it.'How is this a paradox?
lunias: Now the turbo encabulator on the other hand...
rdevilla: I agree. Mostly they are copes for lack of first-class functions and multiple dispatch. Go through GoF and you will see this is the case for 80% of the patterns.OOP has no firm theoretical foundation, unlike FP which is rooted in the formalisms of mathematics.
red_admiral: Ok, I'm in an argumentative mood, and I think this is more true than not.The first theoretical foundation of OOP is structural induction. If you design a class such that (1) the constructor enforces an invariant and (2) every public method maintains that invariant, then by induction it holds all the time. The access modifiers on methods help formalise and enforce that. You can do something similar in a functional language, or even in C if you're disciplined (especially with pointers), but it was an explicit design goal of the C++/Java/C# strand of OOP to anchor that in the language.The second theoretical foundation is subtyping or Liskov substitution, a bit of simple category theory - which gets you things like contravariance on return types and various calculi depending on how your generics work. Unfortunately the C++ people decided to implement the idea with subclassing which turned out to be a mess, whereas interface subtyping gets you what you probably wanted in the first place, and still gives you formalisms like Array[T] <= Iterable[S] for any S >= T (or even X[T] <= Y[S] for S >= T and X[_] <= Y[_] if you define subtyping on functors). In Java nowadays you have a Consumer<T> that acts as a (side-effectful) function (T => void) but composes with a Consumer<? super T> to get the type system right [1].Whether most Java/OOP programmers realise the second point is another question.[1] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/api/java.base...
persedes: Agreed, I think it also acts as a hiring filter to scan for candidates that have been exposed to this kind of language and can speak it fluently. The bigger the cooperation, the more widespread that is though, don't see it as often in mid sized companies. Was looking into a director role at a large org and there were lots of very new words thrown at me very quickly.
kevinsync: Last time I worked corporate, we were acquired and I was asked what my job was by somebody on the other side. I said “My job is to make you feel good about whatever it is that I may or may not be doing around this place.”Despite it being a joke, I think there’s a lot of truth in there that explains corp-tongue -- from being visible in endless meetings to in-group parlance to cutthroat promotion tracks, a lot of corporate America boils down to narrative, storytelling and performance more than booking sensible profit and delivering the very best to client and user. This type of language and expression is a major tool for making people feel good about your actual, contestable value in an organization.It’s both kabuki and kayfabe lol
darreninthenet: As a highly experienced consultant once said to me, forget all the objectives, priorities and corporate culture bullshit, whatever anyone tells you, your job is to make your boss look good.
mv4: as someone frequently exhibiting at various industry trade shows, I can confidently say nobody would notice.
teddyh: There is now a second edition of that book which has supposedly been rewritten to fix that.
irishcoffee: Pardon my ignorance, isn't that a lambda in c++?
ndriscoll: Yes, and in Java and other languages (e.g. in Lean you can literally use the syntax λ x ↦ x + 5). When OOP was more of the zeitgeist, these languages didn't have lambda functions.
VorpalWay: It is hard to argue with a vague statement like "most people" without a proper scientific study. But I disagree: following the scientific principle, and being willing to change opinion in the face of new evidence increases my trust in someone. Someone who is certain and confident without showing their work / sources make me suspicious. And critical thinking is (pardon the pun) a critical skill.
el_benhameen: A delightful update to https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w
reactordev: Ah, “the only difference being…”That’s always the line you’re listening for. Everything before that is bullshit, everything after is trying to justify the new product for that one change.In favor of preferable outcomes of operational excellence as part of our customer success. Barf.
fnands: Some of those pictures are delightfully cursed
ekholm_e: George Orwell wrote about this 80 years ago: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
el_benhameen: I keep hearing this from the naysayers, but I just think that they haven’t fully integrated unilateral phase detractors into their work effectively. Maybe you’re using the free retro encabulator tier so you don’t see the full capabilities, but some of us are already twice as productive.
dec0dedab0de: Corporate speak as a signalling mechanism is only effective among the "clueless" in the Gervais model. If any CEO tried to talk 1:1 to a competent board member that way, they would lose all credibility. Once you've operated at a certain level you get itThis also holds true for competent non-board members. I have interacted with C-level executives at fortune 100 companies, as well as smaller businesses. It is almost impressive how quickly they can switch in and out of corporate bullshit mode. I think it's what the kids call code-switching.In general, once they trust you a bit, and they know someone isn't listening they talk like a normal person. Then you ask a difficult question about the business and the corporate-speak kicks in like a security sub routine trying to prevent them from saying the wrong thing.I have also met some that seemingly calculate their tone and cadence to try to manipulate the person(s)/people(s) they're talking to. It's fascinating when you catch them doing it, and it's different than simply matching like a chameleon. For example, they may use an authoritative tone with younger people, a kind but subtly threatening tone with anxious people, and a buddybuddy tone with a plumber or someone they know isn't going to put up with any bullshit.I'm really curious how much of it is formally taught in MBA programs and stuff, how much is them copying each other, and if any of it is just a natural defense mechanism to the pressures of being in power.
macNchz: Ultimately I think all of what you describe there falls into a bucket of personality traits and social skills that contribute to success in many areas of life.It's some combination of what they call "self monitoring" in social psychology, plus general EQ and Machiavellian personality traits that allow people to read the room and adjust their tone, speaking style, word choice (including picking up in-group lingo quickly), posture etc to be most effective given the setting. This applies to basically any social environment, and is often a frustrating reality to many people who may be extremely competent but see others around them who are obviously less competent "getting ahead" through social acumen, office politics etc.This has been studied among MBA graduates, Do Chameleons Get Ahead, The Effects of Self-Monitoring on Managerial Careers (pdf): https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/...
DrBazza: > “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”Modern politics by a different name. The parallels are obvious, along with the Peter Principle and so on.Lots of people on here saying 'that's not me', but probably say 'ping me back' or 'learnings' which is very much one end of the spectrum of corporate bullshit that infects everyone. Some of it is stupidity (the English language has a word: 'lessons'), some of it is natural language evolution, and some of it is 'global' English: 'please revert', and some of it is very intentional management waffle. As the (unviersity) saying goes, 'if you can't blind 'em with science, baffle them with bullshit'.
gzread: This is very relevant to the LLM era.
AnimalMuppet: But if someone says something like "synergizing paradigms", isn't that essentially a parse error to any normal person?You don't need formal language (though formal languages can serve that purpose). You just need to listen like a normal human being rather than like a corporate suit, and that kind of language is just incomprehensible - a parse error. You have to work at it to make sense of that kind of language. And why I took from your first paragraph is permission to treat it as a parse error instead of as some valid message that I needed to decode.
cyanydeez: My guy: corporate sloganeering is as much cultural appropiation as ghetto speak and drug culture.Theres no high minded difference. Its just in/out group identification.
SoftTalker: Most of OOP and design patterns was yet another attempt to make it possible for lower-ability (i.e. cheaper) developers to be productive. Just like dimensional lumber and standards like "wall studs are spaced 16 inches on center" made it possible for a lower-ability carpenter to frame a house and have everything fit together properly. Though in the latter case, it actually was successful.
bitwize: Corporate speak, as satirized in the Weird Al hit "Mission Statement", actually serves an important social function. It signals "I'm one of you, the business class, I will align my goals with those of the organization."It's like that phenomenon of, you have these British people, Hyacinth Bucket types. They want to be seen as upper class when they're not. So they speak in an overly polite register that they think makes them sound upper class. Actual aristocrats, by contrast, speak rather plainly amongst each other. They know where they are in society, and they know that everyone else who matters also knows.Similarly, the people who speak of operationalizing new strategies and leveraging core competencies are trying to sound impressive to those below, and like good little do bees to those above. The people who lead an organization to success speak in terms of the actual problems they encounter and the real things that need to be done to solve them.
jvanderbot: It's surprising to me that people don't consider these coded language.Sure, the junior manager might use them vaguely to mimic, but IMHO, when vague language comes up at decision tables, it's usually coding something more precise in a sort of plausible deniability.A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad playersetc etc.If my impressions are correct, of course ICs are going to balk at these statements - they seem disconnected from reality and are magically disconnected from the effects on purpose. Yes, this is bad management to the ICs, but it's pretty culturally inevitable, I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language.A good manager takes this direction in front of all their ICs, laughs it off as corpo speak, but was given the signal to have a private talk with one of their group who triggered the problem... I dunno maybe my time in management was particularly distopian, but this seemed obvious once I saw it.
Muromec: Its an interesting take, bit why is this coded ingroup messaging is communicated to outgroup then?
PunchyHamster: Do note that senior manager thinking the work is redundant also might be completely not aligned with reality. so "I think your work is redundant" is much closer to usual reality. And it's easy to be seen that as you pretty much also need to be a PR person for your own department, not just a manager, especially if department is doing necessary but not glorious tasks
plaidphantom: Here's another for the pile. https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4?si=yTB_dICMqnLjqVEi
0ckpuppet: this is a roadmap for the conniving lickspittles. Paired with the 48 laws of Power (and weak leadership), it's a winner.
deaux: > it's pretty culturally inevitable, I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language.Pretty shocking belief when you're of courseing all "ICs".If it was inevitable than the amount and degree of corporate BS would've been stable over the last 5 decades, and across countries and languages.In reality, it has been anything but, instead showing massive differences across both.
btilly: More precisely than "plausible deniability", it is plausible EMOTIONAL deniability.When you put enough bafflegab around it, you can almost ignore that you said something unpleasant. Hence the example with ten paragraphs of complexity to hide the pain of a major lay-off.After I noticed this, I found that I did this. I reliably use complex language when I don't like what I'm saying. So much so that I could use readability checkers to find discomfort that I was not aware that I had!And I'm not the only one to notice this. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVtJNv4ZNM for George Carlin's famous skit on how the honesty of the phrase "shell shock" over time got softened over time to "post-traumatic stress disorder". A phrase that can be understood, but no longer felt.Corporations have just developed their own special complex language for this. And you're right. It is emotionally dishonest. That's why they do it.
geon: For anyone else as confused as I was; apparently "IC" means Individual Contributor, as opposed to leadership or management.
jvanderbot: Let's play "spot the manager"
elzbardico: In related news, water is wet and cats usually don't seem to feel confortable when sprayed with it.
loganc2342: > To test this, he created a “corporate bullshit generator” that churns out meaningless but impressive-sounding sentences like, "We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing” and “By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence.”So you’re saying people who thought randomly-generated, meaningless sentences sound smart aren’t themselves smart? Who would’ve thought.
semiinfinitely: deloitte
cushychicken: it's usually coding something more precise in a sort of plausible deniability.Yep. I'm a director now. This is exactly how it is. A big part of being effective in this role is understanding how direct you can be in a given scenario.A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.Option 1 is how I'd say it to a peer whose org is duplicating effort. You can give your advice, but at the end of the day: not my circus, not my clowns.Option 2 is a more-direct way of how I'd say it to someone in my own org. I'd rephrase to: "Someone else is already doing this; focus your efforts on something more impactful."
excalibur: > Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals.Hey, I find that type of lingo nauseating, and I still struggle with practical decision-making.
euio757: 2 reasons for the type of messaging GP jvanderbot talks about (which is different from the Pepsi/Microsoft stuff from TFA):1. Everything is scrutinized in corporate world.2. It'd be tiring to constantly switch between coded vs unfiltered truth.The truth is some of the realities of higher management are some pretty crude primitives GP touches upon: killing redundant projects, moving headcount etc.It's not taken well to discuss those unfiltered so there's the corp speak layer on top.The only time the filter can drop is in unrecorded 1:1 or tiny meetings. Everything else has meeting minutes, some attendees who wouldn't be comfortable with the raw unfiltered descriptions, as those harsh/crude mechanisms may appear cruel.Also some of the directions are sometimes pure "feudal" power plays, so of course nobody will say unfiltered: we are making move X because I picked the winner.Corporate life is tiring enough, if you had to permanently scan the room to figure out if you can switch to unfiltered talk, it'd be too much. Much more efficient to always have the filter on.
oldestofsports: It strongly pushes for max 3 LOC per function, and I am not even joking.
SpicyLemonZest: I don't mean to shame anyone for learning new information, but even if you have no interest in management, your career will benefit greatly from knowing the terms and concepts that managers in your industry commonly use. There's a lot of people out there who are aggressively against learning "corporate jargon" and then find themselves lost trying to understand why their company's leaders talk and act the way they do.
shermantanktop: A lot of the “I won’t learn it” people are young. The ones who aren’t young end up appearing naive and ignorant.The day the layoffs take your job (but not your officemate’s) might be a good day to learn how to read the corporate signals.
wmeredith: It's called busy-ness for a reason.
jimnotgym: In a discussion yesterday about a large and complex physical system that is hard to optimise further without more work for it to do (lots of excess capacity), the VP suggested we should 'consider how emergent technologies could be leveraged to decrease overhead'. It is a clever way to say, I have no ideas either, but if a better machine that hasn't been invented yet becomes available we should use that'. I say 'clever', because the other execs nodded in approval, and agreed. From other conversations I have had with him I was just glad he didn't say 'AI' as per usual, although I am in two minds as to whether he did actually mean AI, but thought he had said it too many times in the last week. I'm not popular because I ask difficult things like, what kind of AI?
dkarl: Bullshit is so dangerous because it could mean something. That VP could mean, it's time to look beyond the set of mature technologies we've been considering and look at newer technologies that we would normally ignore because they come with risks and rough edges and higher cost of ownership.So it might be a substantive decision that affects how everybody in the room will do their jobs going forward. Or it could be a random stream of words chosen because they sound impressive, which everyone will nod respectfully at and then ignore. And like an LLM, he might have made it into his current position without needing to know the difference.
jimnotgym: Correct, and in my opinion we seem to have a cutting edge machine, the best available. So it was BS. What was really troubling them is that for years the operational delivery part of the business has saved everyone else by finding more and more effiencies. I had stated that it was no longer cost effective to spend the money on the diminishing returns of squeezing tiny %s more out of it. The room took on a complete silence, because their strategy (of leaving it to someone else) has gone. Much harder tasks, what goes through the machine, how it is sold, need to come to the fore... and that is terrifying for people who PowerPoint for a living... so instead, they break the silence with BS, nod, pretend it's not happening.
ta988: But how much of that is real as in has measurable positive impact vs random decision making.
Esophagus4: That sounds like a problem with the people producing and consuming the messages, not a problem with the protocol itself :)
johnisgood: What does it mean to be "impressed" by such terms?
SoftTalker: > I have also met some that seemingly calculate their tone and cadence to try to manipulate the person(s)/people(s) they're talking to.This is a trait of a psychopath. Not surprisingly, one finds a lot of them in the executive ranks.
jjkaczor: The polite term these days is "sociopath", which takes out the whole "psycho-killer" weightedness (because a sociopath can be very likeable and friendly) - and they fill the ranks of leadership in all professions...
dghf: Wouldn't that be synthesising paradigms?
andai: Crap, you're right! The goal is synthesis. Can we distil a bunch of models down to something more fundamental and elegant.
alexjplant: Synergy has a real meaning: 1+1=3. A cigar and a whiskey. Chocolate and peanut butter. Hall and Oates. Et cetera. Unfortunately it's one of those terms like "DevOps" or "jam band" or "martini" whose true meaning has been sullied by people trying to sound cooler than they are.On the rare occasions I've used it sincerely in meetings I've always caveated it with some variation of "the real meaning, not the BS one." This never seems to work so I've just dropped it from my verbal lexicon altogether.
fhd2: That's the right move. If a word changes its colloquial meaning, better drop it and find a new one. Happens all the time. From stuff like "agile" in a software development context (pretty meaningless at this point, can mean anything from the original definition to the systematic micro management it got to be commonly associated with), to previously neutral words that became offensive (because they were commonly used as such).No individual holds power over connotations. Language just evolves.
atroon: > No individual holds power over connotations. Language just evolves.Okay, but I still reserve the right to be pissed off at teenagers using 'out of pocket' when they mean 'off the wall' or 'out of bounds'.
jvanderbot: One example elaborated:You _want_ most ICs to ignore a negative message that doesn't involve them, and you _want_ to give middle / lower managers the discretion to address an ICs "nonsynergistic" contributions on their own time. It's a signal not a prescription. This allows a public person to make a public statement and set direction without prescribing actions so lower management and ICs can do their thing.Upper management becomes increasingly vibes-based, from what I can tell.
contubernio: It would be a hell of a lot more functional to simply say directly what you want and mean.This sort of management is dysfunctional even in it's premises.
jvanderbot: In this example you're actually just being polite. You are not calling out a person publicly, you're transmitting a course-correction through their manager that allows the person who knows you best to communicate the correction the best way AND it allows the corpo to take the blame for being vague and uninformative.Sure, direct, cold, concrete, public data is "best" in the objective sense, but people's feelings and pride matter, and any attempt to wave that away is just naive.
beepbooptheory: [delayed]
elzbardico: There's CYA jargon, like layoffs, workforce rationalizations, letting someone go, challenging fiscal environment.And there's blatant bullshit, like paradigm shift, culture building, and so on.Two categories of execspeak.
jvanderbot: I think those are just degree of difference in "context required to understand", not different categories.
johnisgood: You think so, with a term such as "culture building"?
Animats: Corporate jargon is a relatively recent development in business history.[1] It wasn't seen much until the 1950s and 1960s, when "organization development" and management consulting became an industry. Peter Drucker seems to have popularized it in the 1980s.Then came PowerPoint.Before that it was more of a political and religious style of communication. In those areas, speeches and texts designed to be popular but not commit to much dominate. Religious texts are notorious for their ambiguity.The point seems to be to express authority without taking responsibility.[1] https://www.rivier.edu/academics/blog-posts/circling-back-on...
LowLevelKernel: Doesn’t your brain tune out those words?
jjk166: In the test these weren't coded language, they were randomly generated phrases. The finding is that the people who don't know how to decipher the code are easily impressed by it and have poor analytical skills.
jvanderbot: from TFA:> “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”I'm taking issue with "semantically empty" and saying they're actually semantically rich, but they are coded signals. Coded signals become increasingly indistinguishable from noise.
oblio: > Eventually they figured out that language served a different purpose inside the bond market than it did in the outside world. Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders. Overpriced bonds were not "expensive" overpriced bonds were "rich," which almost made them sound like something you should buy. The floors of subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors--or anything else that might lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind--but tranches. The bottom tranche--the risky ground floor--was not called the ground floor but the mezzanine, or the mezz, which made it sound less like a dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium. A CDO composed of nothing but the riskiest, mezzanine layer of subprime mortgages was not called a subprime-backed CDO but a "structured finance CDO." "There was so much confusion about the different terms," said Charlie. "In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there's a reason why it doesn't quite make sense to us. It's because it doesn't quite make sense."The Big Short by Michael Lewis, page 101.
astrange: I thought a mezzanine was when you go see a movie at noon.
bcrosby95: Some 80s and 90s hip hop songs used "out of pocket" like that, so that usage is probably even older than that. So direct your anger at both teenagers and adults nearing retirement age.
sp1nningaway: I think this also explains some of our political climate. Everything the current administration says sounds like gibberish and equivocation to me, but to its intended audience it is a clear communication about wielding power and grift.Conversely, when someone talks about "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices, to me it's a clear statement about who gets to define meaning and whose history counts, but to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright attack.
g3f32r: > to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright attack.These are separate things. If he's interpreting it as an outright attack, he _is_ hearing it correctly. But incoherence would imply he's _not_ hearing the coded language in it's true meaning.
fhd2: Absolutely. I'm pro emotions :) Just also good to realise what battles are lost.I do sometimes rebelliously use words in their original connotation along with an unnecessarily lengthy explanation. Never anything that's now an insult, of course, those I just stay away from and am not mad about either.
andrewflnr: If you actually think and act that way, so much the better. I don't even particularly disbelieve you. But can you really look at the mass of humanity around you and believe they think the same way? Even if they claim to value critical thinking, watch what they do, what they buy, how they vote.You've most likely trained yourself to value critical thinking in your leaders, most likely from an early enough age that you don't remember what it was like without it. Lots of people don't get this training or don't apply it in a fully general way.
johnisgood: Why would you drop it altogether? Medications and/or supplements can have synergistic effects, for example. Synergy is actually a term that is formally defined as "Effect(A + B) > Effect(A) + Effect(B)".
michaelt: The point of saying and writing things is to be understood by your audience.If I know a given wording is widely misunderstood, to the point I'm planning to immediately follow it with a clarification - often that's a sign it's not a very good wording.There are exceptions, of course - go ahead and say Cephalopods (things like octopuses and squid) if you're a marine biology educator.
aljgz: Seems to be hugged to death. Link from The Wayback Machine:https://web.archive.org/web/20260302211051/https://news.corn...
AnimalMuppet: Not exactly?Let's say there are a thousand people there at the town hall. You don't want any of them to leave upset, or even concerned. But they each have different things that will make them concerned and upset. So there are maybe 10,000 tripwires out there, and you don't want to trip any of them.So you're not being dishonest, exactly. You're being nonspecific. You don't want to get down in the weeds and nail down the answer too tightly, because you may trip someone's tripwire. (And also because it would take to long.) So you say something true but not very specific.(I mean, there can be dishonesty, too, but that's a different thing. Smooth vagueness can still be honest, just unsatisfyingly vague.)
duped: "Smooth vagueness" to me comes off as tautologies. If you cannot say anything specific it means either you don't know, or don't want others to know. So it is a lie about ones' competency, or a lie by omission.It's all dishonesty at the end of the day.
red-iron-pine: > The Russian language has two different words for what most European languages would describe as lies. One is lozh (ложь), best translated into what we consider to be a lie; something that is the opposite of the truth. There is also vranyo (враньё). Vranyo is more than a simple lie. It is described as: ‘You know I’m lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.’Trump is taking a lesson from Putin. Social media makes this extra easy, as you can bury criticism with a hoard of what-aboutism-bots, redirected arguments, and straight up BS.see also: https://militairespectator.nl/artikelen/vranyo
rawgabbit: [delayed]
rawgabbit: This is a masterpiece. I have seen similar slides in many consultants' decks over the years.
jjk166: But they're not semantically rich. People who speak the code aren't doing it to more efficiently communicate, such that a long and complicated message can be expressed quickly. They are taking a short simple message, stripping away all the details, then padding it such that it becomes more verbose and vapid. This makes the real message harder to decipher for the uninitiated, it removes information even for those who understand the code, and it serves as a display for people who appreciate the flourish. There may still be some meaning left, but it's semantically emptier.Further much of it is not even code. Examples like the microsoft letter are clearly a performative act to soften the blow of bad news. No one in the know is reading such an email to discern some hidden message; it's written to not be read.
ahoka: No, that’s mescaline (Spanish for tequila).
red-iron-pine: The Gervais Principle by the Ribbonfarm guy gets into this: powertalk vs. babytalkhttps://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...the Cornell article is basically just empirical testing of these concepts.
ignoramous: Also summarised in https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of...
rawgabbit: It was my attempt at a joke.
andrewflnr: In some cases, sure, they're semantically rich, but the result here is that in some cases it doesn't matter whether they are or not, that some people can't tell. That can still be true even if corporate jargon originated and is sometimes still used for rational-ish reasons.
butILoveLife: The Karl Popper in me says: Its barely useful science because its not falsifiable.Its like a horoscope, it applies to everyone.Its closer to a tautology "Its raining or its not" than a contradiction "Its raining and its not".The closer to contradiction limits the possible realities, which makes it better science.Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.
throwawaysleep: > Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.As long as you can define some measure of "worse at their jobs", which corporations routinely do, this seems like an easy thing to falsify.Go get employee eval scores and poll everyone on whether they eat breakfast.
DrewADesign: And they did use cognitive tests that were correlated with job performance. If the people did not perform differently on those tests, or performed better on those tests… well there you go. Is it the most rigorous study in the world? Obviously not. Does it indicate what it purports to indicate? It sure does.
